Runners  (2011)

Runners  (2011)

Lanikai Shrimp Shack, Hawaii,
Ingrid’s Hair Design, Denmark
Ixa’s Bicycle World, Panama
Advertisements placed by Chodzko on the back page of Main Echo, Frankfurt, March 29, 30 and 31, 2011

A public intervention as part of the solo exhibition, Scenes from a Marriage at Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, 2011.
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An ongoing series of ‘interventions’, using different newspapers around the world,  Runners is created through Chodzko finding small and often precarious businesses that exist in remote places without any online presence or capacity to advertise or promote their services beyond a local setting, and then designs and places advertisements on their behalf (as a ‘gift’ yet, without their permission) in newspapers based in major urban centres in Western European countries.  The businesses are mostly found using Google Earth (and its users added photographs) and Street View and sometimes directly, through travelling.
For example, a bicycle repair shack in Panama – Ixa’s Bicycle World –  is advertised in a newspaper classifieds section in the centre of Frankfurt, apparently transcending, in a huge leap, its current context in terms of place and reach and market.    It perhaps gives the impression that these businesses are seeking an international recognition; an act which might appear to be totally misguided for what they offer –  a signal in the wrong place.  Being out of place, or confusing, disturbs the normal hierarchies, expectations, limitations and language of these everyday advertisements. There is no financial sense to the act but perhaps it is good for our perceptions of the world to consider, briefly, but empathically, a shrimp shack on the beach in Hawaii (Lanikai Shrimp Shack, Kailua Beach Car Park, (off Alala Road), Kailua, Hawaii, 21°23’43.18” N   157°43’22.19” W) when in the midst of browsing the classifieds to find…a local electrician?
Chodzko uses the term Runners in a botanical sense, referring to stolons, a hidden (underground) root and dissemination system, with plants growing some distance apart but connected to each other through a subterranean system. Runners also more literally suggests, speed and motion.
As with many related works by Chodzko (eg: Transmitters (1991) and Flashers (1996 – ) etc )  Runners is a way of creating an artwork, unobtrusively, in a banal public place, accessible to anyone, yet without clarifying its authorship or that it is to be considered ‘art’, it’s only tension with its site and audience is that it seems ‘out of place’, wrong, a flaw.

For a related work: ‘Why are you Here?’, Two project pages, created for Kome til deg i Tidende, no.2, a ‘meta newspaper’ hosted by the Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum, Norway, 2012, Chodzko wrote:
In each of the advertisements [for Tidende] the co-ordinates of latitude and longitude lead to places where these businesses and institutions operate from.  You can find them by putting them into Google Earth. On Google Earth there are also images posted (by anyone, usually tourists) at these exact locations. My advertisements take elements (and misunderstandings) from these ‘found’ images.  They are advertisements designed with a very naïve understanding of marketing.
I picked Nicaragua, Mozambique and Kyrgyzstan because they are listed on Wikipedia as having some of the smallest migrant populations in Norway. This work is therefore for the readers of Tidende to wonder about the 461 people from Nicaragua, Mozambique and Kyrgyzstan living in Norway in 2012 who might stumble across this newspaper, to see what they are seeing.

Related works:
We are Sorry    (July 9, 2013)
In culo alla balena!   [“Into the ass of a whale!” ]  (2012)
Runners  (2013)
We love you here, even though you are there        (2012)
The God Look-Alike Contest (1991-1992)
Secretors          (1993 – )
Transmitters    (1991 – )
Flashers (1996 – )